En cours de chargement...
Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. It is all her husband wants, all her mother-in-law wants, and she has tried everything. But when her relatives insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of 1980s Nigeria, Stay With Me is a story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the power of grief and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood.
It is a tale about the desperate attempts we make to save ourselves, and those we love, from heartbreak.
The hidden costs of parenthood
Ayobami Adébàyo's "Stay With Me" is an extremely powerful début novel by a new Nigerian voice. The author never fails to surprise the reader with a subject treated many times over in fiction, namely the desire for parenthood for a married middle-class couple. Alternating the voices of Yejide and Akin (wife and husband) in successive chapters, Adébayo succeeds in maintaining a certain dramatic tension in exposing each protagonist's position in their shared failure to achieve parenthood. Their situation is obviously quite dire against the backdrop of their traditional culture which offers 'solutions' not necessarily compatible with the aspirations of their bourgeois culture. A thought-provoking read which begs the question -- is parenthood desirable at any cost, against one's better judgement and the fate of others ?